For the adventurous: Visit Stetson Creek Ranch near Angelus Oaks. From a turnout on Highway 38 at mile marker 24.91, drive rocky and rutty Forest Service Road 1N86 for a little more than 2 miles, following ranch signs. High-clearance vehicle recommended. They have apples.

Riverside County

Above Banning/Beaumont: Drive Highway 243 to Lake Fulmor, or continue on to Idyllwild.

Above Hemet: Drive Highway 74 to Lake Hemet and the Garner Valley.

Near Temecula: Drive, bike or hike the Palomar Mountain area.

Orange County: Visit Silverado, Trabuco canyons later in the fall.

Sierra Nevada

Outside the area: If you're up for a long drive, take the 15 to Highway 395 north, and drive to Lone Pine, Bishop or Mammoth Lakes. Head up into the Sierra for an autumn shower like something you'd see in the Rockies.

Source: Angeles, San Bernardino national forests

At long last, autumn arrives Thursday. But in this part of the country it doesn’t mean a whole lot.

Hey, do we really have fall in Southern California, anyway, or is the season just one of 50 shades of summer?

“The short answer is that we do have a fall,” said Alex Tardy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego. “But it’s shorter. It’s condensed. Especially compared to most of the United States.”

Roger Boddaert, a tree expert based in Fallbrook, agreed.

“Things are changing. Things are occurring out in nature,” Boddaert said. But he said our fall is more subtle and arrives more slowly.

Those who live in colder climes are detecting a crispness in the air. You’ll notice no such exhilarating chill here.

“You really have to go into our mountains and into our high deserts to notice that,” Tardy said.

DAYLIGHT MERCY

Yes, the sun is lower in the sky. And, yes, the length of time we are subjected to baking sunlight is mercifully shrinking.

But that doesn’t mean the mercury is about to hop on the autumn bandwagon.

“Certainly the sun angle alone is not doing it for us,” Tardy said. “For us, what we need is a Pacific storm. And we don’t typically get those storms until the November time frame. That’s really, ultimately, what cools us off.”

You won’t see a whole lot of fall color in the city until then, either.

“Our founding fathers here in Southern California, they imported a lot of inappropriate landscaping, a lot of nonnative trees,” said Bill Patzert, climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “So in some neighborhoods we do actually have fall.”

BRIGHT RED

Don’t want to wait until November? Take a drive during the next few weeks to our local mountains. That crispness at higher elevations is just beginning to generate autumn hues and should snowball in October.

“We’re seeing some of the sycamores change to yellow right now,” said Nathan Judy, a spokesman for the Angeles National Forest.

And San Bernardino National Forest spokesman John Miller said oaks and other trees are beginning to change there.

“They are turning orange and brown, and they’ll lose their leaves shortly,” Miller said. “What you don’t see that you see back East is those bright reds.”

PEEPING PARADISE

There’s an aspen grove in the San Bernardino Mountains. It’ll display color even though it’s recovering from last year’s massive Lake fire. But you won’t see it. The burn area is still closed.

In Orange County, one can spot color in Silverado and Trabuco canyons, although it tends to arrive later in the fall, a Forest Service official said.

Southern California isn’t exactly a leaf-peeping paradise in the best of times. And following five years of drought, the fall color will be less brilliant than usual.

To be fair, fall isn’t all about color. It is, after all, partly about sun angle.

“The most obvious indication of autumn is length of day,” Patzert said. “We’ve had long, lazy dog days of summer here since June. Slowly those days start shrinking, shortening. And now we’re in this steep decline.”

Nights are roughly as long as days – and they’re getting longer.

The season is also marked by a big orange harvest moon that glows on those longer nights. That moon is what Susan Sims, a Riverside arborist, thought of.

FALL-ISH

Sims said her thoughts also turn to fall’s negative face: ferocious hot and dry Santa Ana winds and the year’s peak fire danger.

“I grew up in Southern California, so I guess that’s autumn to me,” she said.

On the other hand, the Santa Ana-fueled temperatures make it feel like summer again.

“They certainly don’t feel fall-ish,” Tardy said.

Always a challenge, distinguishing between seasons has been made tougher in recent years – no matter what the calendar said – because the region has bounced from one dry episode to another and repeatedly shattered heat records.

“With the drought,” said Tardy, “it’s been one continuous summer with a different sun angle.”

NO LA NIñA?

Yet, there is a ray of hope on the autumnal horizon that this fall and winter will be wetter – and cooler.

It looked bleak. El Niño, that potent pool of hot water in the Pacific, failed to deliver the rains forecasters predicted, at least in the southern part of the state. And La Niña, marked by cooler-than-normal water, threatened to take over and make things worse.

But federal weather watchers called off the La Niña watch earlier this month.

“The absence of La Niña right now sort of opens the door for perhaps North Pacific or atmospheric river events this winter,” Patzert said.

“La Niña would have more or less guaranteed a sixth year of punishing drought. But the lack of La Niña right now gives us a little hope.”

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